Here in Cape Town, our pooches are used to coming face to face with a number of different animals.

One thing they won’t come across is a family of bears, though, which is what happened in a pretty remote part of Russia.

Captured by a drone operator near the village of Ust-Kamchatsk in Kamchatka, in the far east of the country, the video shows the laika (a breed of dog that usually hunts bears) getting up and close and personal with the family.

RT reports that “the Russian Far East peninsula is teeming with wildlife, with the protected area said to be populated by between 10 000 and 14 000 brown bears”, so perhaps this isn’t the first time these two have crossed paths.

Here’s the drone footage:

As long as everyone gets along, innit.

You might have also seen that recent drone video of the baby bear fighting its way through the snow to its mother. Cute, sure, but also another reminder of how drone operators are harassing animals to get the perfect shot.

The Smithsonian with this:

“The bears would not have felt the need to take these risks were they not disturbed by the drone,” Dani Rabaioitti, a PhD student with the Zoological Society of London, wrote on Twitter. “The drone operator could have killed the cub.”

…Clayton Lamb, a University of Alberta researcher who studies grizzly bears, tells Ed Yong of the Atlantic that she may have interpreted the encroaching drone as an attack, and was trying to swat her baby away from danger.

“[I]t doesn’t matter how far away [the drone] was,” Lamb says, “because I can tell from the bears’ behavior that it was too close.”

If you have a drone, that’s cool, but be respectful towards the animals (and humans) that you film.

[source:rt&smithsonian]